by Kevin Yank

Ruby on Rails 1.0 was just released, thus eliminating your last excuse (“It’s not even a stable release!”) for not trying the most buzzword-friendly Web development framework of the year.

For those who have been living under a rock (or, I must admit, for those who have been waiting for SitePoint to write about it), Ruby on Rails is a double-whammy of a programming language (Ruby) and a framework (Rails), which together form a powerful platform for building dynamic Websites quickly.

Ruby on Rails is designed around an agile development methodology, where you start by getting something simple working in a hurry and then build on that core with small changes that gradually produce the finished product. For example, it takes only a few minutes to configure Rails to access your database, from which it can automatically generate a set of pages to view your database records and add/modify/delete records through an administration interface. You can then progressively tweak that auto-generated Web application to get the look and functionality that you want.